There was not a single sound to be heard.

“Where the hell did you go?” he breathed.

He walked through the living room and into the kitchen.  There were no appliances except for a very old refrigerator.  The shelves that he could see were bare.  An old, rusty bread pan had been left on the counter next to the empty sink.  The dust here was undisturbed.

At the far end of the kitchen was a door, but he couldn’t make it open.  If the man left through here, he must have locked it behind him somehow.

He returned to the living room and peered down the hallway.  He could see a bathroom and a single bedroom.  This house certainly didn’t offer much in the way of space.  It wasn’t much bigger than his and Karen’s first apartment.

He walked to the bathroom and flipped the light switch.  In case the empty kitchen and accumulated dust hadn’t been enough for him, the lack of power confirmed that this was no one’s permanent residence.

He stood in the hallway for a moment, trying to piece together what had happened so far.  Even ignoring the dreams and the weird compulsion to drive out to this freaky backwoods, there was plenty to think about.  Was someone screwing with his head?

That old woman…  Ethan’s wife.  She’d mentioned another man.  “Him.”  Could the vanishing figure he followed from the barn to this house have been the very same man who had frightened her yesterday?  He hadn’t seen anything like the invisible fog that she had described, but he’d only caught the two brief glimpses.

He stepped into the bedroom and looked around.  The bed was stripped down to a stained mattress with broken down springs.  There was an old wardrobe against one wall.  The only other thing in the room was an old, tarnished mirror hanging on the wall opposite the doorway.

He walked over to the mirror and gazed at himself.

It was now that a thought occurred to him.  The whole time he was in the barn, everything he saw also emerged from the buried memory of his dream.  But here, inside this house, he had no such recollections.  In fact, he didn’t remember the tall, bearded man.  He recalled exiting the barn and walking out into the tall grass and bright sunshine and that was all.  The rest of the dream remained clouded in his memory.

What did that mean?

A horrible feeling began to creep into his gut again.  But this was different than what he felt as he entered the barn.  This was much worse, much more urgent.

A thought occurred to him:  If this place wasn’t in his dream, then maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here.

He turned away from the mirror and began to walk toward the door, eager to leave these empty rooms, even if it meant returning to that nightmare barn.  But as he passed in front of the wardrobe, the doors burst open and something shot out at him.  An awful, convulsing shape exploded outward, snarling viciously.

Eric cried out and stumbled away from it, backing himself into the corner behind the bed.

Impossibly, the gnarled shape unfolded itself from the cramped confines of the wardrobe.  It was difficult to make out.  The thing was almost entirely black, seemingly enfolded in its own shadows, with bright red, glistening streaks undulating across its oily flesh.  Every time he thought he could almost discern its shape, it changed, warping and flexing and coiling itself.

Something that looked like a hand with dozens of taloned fingers blossomed from the black and crimson mass and reached across the room for him.

Fairly certain that Narnia was not where it intended to take him, Eric leapt onto the stained mattress and threw himself across the bed and onto the floor on the other side.  A blood-chilling roar shook the room as he scrambled back to his feet and bolted for the door.

He saw something from the corner of his eye and barely managed to duck out of the way as a heavy mass passed over his head.

Behind him, he heard the bed crash against the wall.

Somehow making it to the door, he ran down the short hallway, past the bathroom and into the living room before daring to look back over his shoulder.

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t.  A horrid mass of snaking black and blood-red flesh was boiling from the bedroom door, wicked claws tearing open the wallpaper and the carpet, decimating the plaster ceiling tiles.  In the very center of the mass, a horrid face snarled at him, its gaping mouth revealing countless gnashing teeth.

Terrified out of his mind, Eric ran screaming through the screen door and onto the porch, where he found himself directly in the path of a charging bulldozer.

Chapter Six

Coherent thought failing him, Eric reacted less on calculated strategy than on pure instinct and adrenaline.  Uttering a startled and, to his credit, a rather creative curse, he turned and leapt over the porch railing with the kind of grace he hadn’t demonstrated in at least ten years.  And then he sprawled face-first into the grass with exactly the kind of grace befitting him these days.

Behind him, the wooden porch burst into splinters against the onslaught of the dozer’s blade.

Even over the roar of the engine and the resounding crash of cold steel against breaking wood, Eric could hear the thing that came out of the wardrobe.  A terrible, rage-filled howl cut through the air and seemed to carve its way into his very soul.

Then there was only the thrumming roar of the machine.

Then even that sputtered into silence.

“You okay?”

Eric sat up and turned around to see what the hell had just happened.  The first thing he saw was that it was not a bulldozer that had nearly flattened him as he fled the farmhouse after all, but rather an ordinary tractor with an impressive hydraulic blade mounted on its front.  The blade was now firmly pressed against the front door of the house, preventing the wardrobe monster from following him.

He had no idea what was keeping it from lunging through one of the house’s windows instead.  It had been fully capable of throwing the bed across the room and tearing apart the hallway.  But the house seemed to have fallen utterly silent in the wake of the tractor’s unexpected assault.

The next thing his racing mind took in was the old man climbing down from the tractor’s seat, the man who had likely just saved his life, but just as easily could have squashed him into jelly.  All the easier for the monster to chew.

He was a tall, slender man, with hard, sun-beaten skin wearing dark, oversized glasses and a blue and white cap.  “When I saw you go in there, I thought you were done for.”

“Guess I almost was.”  He recalled looking back down the hallway and seeing that awful face clawing after him.  He also recalled, now that the gripping panic had subsided and he was thinking back on it without the mortal fear of his imminent and violent death, that the screams he was spouting at that moment weren’t exactly the manliest of cries.

Well, at least he hadn’t wet himself.  That would have to do, he supposed.

“Didn’t Annette warn you about leaving the path?”

“Annette?”

The old man cocked his head, lifted his hat and ran a hand through his thick, gray hair.  “No.  I suppose she didn’t.”

Eric’s eyes drifted back to the ruined porch.  What was keeping that thing inside?  He couldn’t think of a single reason why a thing like that wouldn’t still be tearing after him, yet the old man didn’t seem remotely concerned about standing this close to the house.

“I guess she’s still going on about Ethan.”

Ethan?  Ethan was the old woman’s husband, he recalled.  Now he understood.  She was Annette.

“She never accepted it.  He’s been gone a while now.”

At this, Eric turned and met the old man’s eyes.  Ethan was dead?  Suddenly, he remembered the way she kept staring at the shirts as she hung them up, that profoundly sad look in her eyes.  She talked about her father, and made it sound like she was worried that she might lose Ethan the same way.  She even said something about giving him a red ribbon for good luck.  But Ethan was already dead and gone.  That was perhaps the saddest thing he had heard in a long time.